Simon of the Playa wrote:"oh hell, ANYONE will do it if told to do so....so therefore, they were just following orders..."

Interestingly, or not, the guy who did the Stanford Prison experiement published a book on it in the past year or two. He testified for the defense at one Abu Graib trial, and you could see it as an excuse for the soldier or as an inditement of the higher ups and how they set up a situation (knowingly or not) that was very likely going to go rotten in that way.

I'm not sure if i finished the book or not. I think Zimbardo was pretty honest about what happened, but it's hard to say.

ok, here's my thing with Zimbardo, Mephistophelian Hair and Beard aside, lets look at from whence he came. Every time i go to the "Thin Stick" i get this uneasy feeling, and it's not the waffle cakes from not-so great America, either, but a certain hidden malignant undercurrent exists at stanford, like one of the centers of blind, and almost always corrupted, science.

Brookhaven comes to mind, as well as Sandia.

the research or the researchers may think what they are working on is going to somehow benefit Mankind, otherwise they would'nt do it, Right?

one would hope morals and ethics would somehow influence the Blind Force that is Science and Progress, temper the sharp sword that technology can do, and be.

The problem is, History has shown us this is not the case, and whether you use the Tuskegee Trials as an example, or Dr. Mengele as one of the worst and most heinous, one could say he was the Evil GrandFather of genetics in the same cold, scientific breath.

(shudder)

Now, back to Stanford....

Long associated with all kinds of wonderful DARPA research, as well as the ever increasing field of brain, cognitive science meets Big Pharma money Teat suckling, Stanford, as well as Harvard, and the University of Rochester, MIT, Cal-Tech, U of Chicago, have all participated in what most people would consider dangerous and harmful research for the Military, specifically, and at the bequest of our Government.

Zimbardo is a part of that Kultur, and he knows it.

Is he an Albert Speer? A man who makes a faustian bargain to pursue his Artistic or Intellectual Dreams, no expense spared, except your soul.

i question a man's integrity when he has a serious issue with Grecian Formula.

Research is nearly always a two-edged sword. As an example, we are using the internet, which is an outgrowth of the Arpanet, which was designed as a communication method that could route around damage (specifically: sites being destroyed by nuclear weapons). The Arpanet was created with funding from ARPA (later DARPA), a research arm of the DoD.

There are a lot of discoveries and inventions related to war that get used for benign purposes, and a lot of peacetime [anyone remember peacetime?] innovations that are used for war. Knowledge has a strong tendency to flow across boundaries.

Full disclosure: I was a grad student at MIT during the 70's, and my education was funded in large part by DoD funding. The outcome was (I think) benign: research into programming languages, fully in the public domain and freely available. But I would be naive to think that there was no influence on software used for military purposes.

Seriously, while working as a contract lab tech at the VA Hospital in Reno, I had to hold a guy"s shoulders down while he was getting electroshock treatment. For reals, it was screwed up. I still dream about this guy twitching under my hands. Lets not mention bodybags...